ChatGPT and the frustrated Socrates

Abstract

Abstract We present a case study of a conversation between ourselves and an artificial intelligence-based chatbot ChatGPT. We asked the chatbot to respond to a basic physics question that will be familiar to most physics teachers: ‘A teddy bear is thrown into the air. What is its acceleration in the highest point?’ The chatbot’s responses, while linguistically quite advanced, were unreliable in their correctness and often full of contradictions. We then attempted to engage in Socratic dialogue with the chatbot to resolve the errors and contradictions, but with little success. We found that ChatGPT is not yet good enough to be used as a cheating tool for physics students or as a physics tutor. However, we found it quite reliable in generating incorrect responses on which physics teachers could train assessment of student responses.